This isn’t about shame. It’s about how little space there is between empowerment and survival–and how blurry the line gets when you’re trying to live with dignity.
Tag: Writing
Doing All the Things I Meant to Do Ten Years Ago
Here I’ve spent all this time building an identity as a rough and tough, non-driving native New Yorker: city savvy, fast walking and rare.
Letter from a Faculty Advisor
I believe in 12th Street because it offers opportunities for empathy and community, while functioning as a digital creative stage. The publishing process brings people and ideas together and ultimately benefits everyone involved.
Norwegian Concepts
This feeling is called Yalmståd by the Norwegian people. There is no English equivalent. Even calling it a “feeling” does it a disservice; it is both a way of seeing and of being. All we can say is thank God; as the American dialect seems increasingly interpretive, movements like Yalmståd give us the means of understanding our world.
Flaco II: At the New York Historical
Nothing could bring him back. And then I heard his voice.
An Ode to the Blue Note
At the venue, the line between artist and spectator is meaningfully blurred.
Two Poems by Naomi Riggs
i think / therefore I am / and I / am no child of yours
In Passing
At thirty-three years old, with not even an ugly contender at her doorstep asking to marry her, Alima had gone to see the old clairvoyant.
The Sweetest Sorrow
I always knew when you were close. Sometimes, I would smell you on my clothes, but only on the nights you got drunk enough to sleep on my shoulder. I never moved you off, and you never complained about the crick in your neck in the mornings after.
Author Jason Reynolds never gets boring
For his 2024 novel Twenty-Four Seconds, Reynolds realized that there were not many books addressing “black boys’ tenderness.”
Two Poems by Jack Brown
A man walks into the bar and sees only me
because I am there. He says Good enough but hesitates.
sacred bodies
how many times can someone cry out for God in a night?
Camp (It’s a Mitzvah!)
It is 1982. I just turned 14 last month. It is the summer before 10th grade. I am at a sleepaway camp in the Catskills. I am staying in what used to be a hotel that the camp randomly assigns to campers. It’s not fancy, but it’s better than the cabins. It’s really cool because I am with a group of girls from Long Island. It’s like they are a gang of Rizzos from Grease.
I Bought a Rug
Recently, I looked around my room and thought, if I were to die inexplicably in my sleep, I would be surrounded by nothing.
Letter from the Editor, 2023-24
The phrase “particularly in these times” stands out to me.
Unbecoming Homeless
Who cares about which direction the stocks are headed when you don’t know where you and your family will be sleeping tonight?
Cecilia Gentili’s Legacy, Southern Transness, and the Reclamation of Sainthood
Above all, Cecilia embodied the spirit of a saint, transcending the boundaries of convention and challenging sanctimony as a trans sex worker of color.
Down South
Driving gingerly driving motherly.
Hope for Rain
It is summer and all my friends are dying.
